Geologist Dr Yani Najman, from Lancaster University, explains how a research partnership with industry revealed a potential new earthquake risk in the region just south of the Himalayas.

I am an academic geologist, and whilst my interests do not lie in finding oil, I sometimes partner with hydrocarbon companies for our mutual benefit. We both study sedimentary deposits, me to understand how mountains grow, them to discover hydrocarbons, and oil companies can provide unique access to subsurface imaging of these sedimentary deposits that academic geologists could never afford.

And so it came to pass that I instigated research with a team of international scientists, using data donated by the hydrocarbons industry, to understand the geology of the sedimentary basin that lies to the south of the Himalayas.

Such basins are of interest to oil companies since they can contain oil if certain conditions are met: firstly, the right rocks must be present, and secondly the rocks must be deformed to form traps into which the oil might migrate.

In order to determine if a sedimentary basin has the right attributes to potentially contain oil, oil companies need to build up a sub-surface image of the area. They do this using a seismic survey, which involves bouncing sound waves off the sedimentary layers, kilometres deep in the basin.

Seismic data acquisition is extremely costly, and so our academic team was very excited to be given access to the data from the Himalayan sedimentary basin – the first time anyone had “seen” below the surface in this region. And what we found has significant hazard implications for people living in this densely populated region.

Let’s take a step back to understand the context. The Himalayas formed when the two continents of India and Asia collided. India is still pushing north into Asia today and this causes the rocks to deform and break along fault lines. The result, when these faults move, is earthquakes, such as the Nepal earthquake of 2015 that killed over 9000 people.

Previously, people thought that the southernmost extent of this faulted region lay at the mountain front and that the flat sedimentary basin to the south was undeformed. But our new data reveal that the faults extend 40 kms further south, in the subsurface of the sedimentary basin. Because these faults have not broken to surface, they have previously lain undetected. Only with the use of seismic data that allow us a glimpse of what lies beneath the Earth’s surface, can these faults be detected.

Such faults could move in the future and cause earthquakes. And whilst we can’t stop such earthquakes occurring, our new knowledge of the region provides impetus to educate the population who live in this region on how to build earthquake-resilient structures.

We published our results in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, and we are particularly proud of our partnership with industry, using data to its full potential, for both economic gain and societal good.

You can learn more about our research is this video, narrated by Mike Duvall (University of Alberta), who focussed on this topic for his PhD thesis advised by John Waldron (University of Alberta), Laurent Godin (Queens University) and myself.

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More about Yani's discovery can be found here: 'New fault system discovered in Southeastern Nepal'

Yani's blog posts from the archive: Blog Archive - Yani Najman

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